A Student's Guide To Theatergoing In New York City During COVID-19

Upper West Side NY

27 August, 2021

12:03 PM

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Columbia Daily Spectator BY SOPHIE CRAIG AUGUST 26, 2021 Pack your vaccine card and your delightfully tacky, Playbill-decorated face mask—New York City theaters are back with live performances. This return coincides with Columbia's own grand reopening: Waves of new students are crashing onto campus, crisscrossing the lawns with their blue bins and green passes, and potentially flooding all the way down to the Theater District. While the pandemic saw incredible bursts of creativity, such as "The Glass Menagerie" staged on the playwright's own fire escape and Amy Berryman's "Walden" plopped in the middle of a Connecticut meadow, innovations like these were often short-lived and inaccessible to quarantined students—appearing and disappearing like flares in the dark. This September, however, the whole city is lighting back up. Each of Broadway's 41 venues will reopen at full capacity, requiring both masks and proof of vaccination through at least October. The coming season is full of crowd-pleasers like "Hamilton," "Wicked," and "Chicago"—somewhat safer investments given the decimated tourism industry. The wildly popular Tony-Award winner "Harry Potter and the Cursed Child" will also return to the Lyric Theatre as a one-act performance, its enormous runtime condensed due to financial concerns. Notably, every new play opening on Broadway this fall was penned by a Black author. Beginning with Antoinette Chinonye Nwandu's "Pass Over," seven different plays will transport audiences from an auto plant in Dominique Morisseau's "Skeleton Crew," to the streets of Brooklyn in Keenan Scott II's "Thoughts of a Colored Man," to Lynn Nottage's fictional truck stop restaurant in "Clyde's." A two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright and Columbia professor, Nottage will also feature a bit closer to home: The Barnard Theater Department will produce her play "By the Way, Meet Vera Stark" in October. Off-Broadway, Shakespeare in the Park leaped back to life this past July with Jocelyn Bioh's "Merry Wives," an adaptation of "The Merry Wives of Windsor" set among West African immigrants in South Harlem. The production will complete its run at Central Park's Delacorte Theater on Sept. 18, after which the Public Theater will settle back into Astor Place for the world premiere of "The Visitor," written for the stage by Tom Kitt, Brian Yorkey, and Kwame Kwei-Armah. Erika Dickerson-Despenza's saga of the ongoing water crisis in Flint, Michigan, "cullud wattah," will premiere in early November. The Public Theater's highly anticipated premiere of Susan-Lori Parks' "Plays for the Plague Year," whose premiere date remains unannounced, might be of particular interest to incoming students who will read Parks' "Father Comes Home from the Wars" for Literature Humanities. Back in March 2020, Parks made the remarkable decision to write a new play every day, creating a living diary of the lockdown. Further downtown, the New York Theatre Workshop plans to offer reduced capacity for Sunday performances of Martyna Majok's "Sanctuary City," opening Sept. 8. This will be followed by "Dreaming Zenzile," a play based on the life of lauded South African singer and activist Miriam Makeba. While Broadway surges forward in its reopening plans, some theaters are stepping back. Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Annie Baker's "Infinite Life," her final work under residency at the Signature Theater, has been postponed—a decision to be reevaluated on a "case-by-case basis," according to the theater's website. As of Aug. 20, the Signature Theater will continue as planned with the remainder of its season. Anna Deavere Smith's "Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992" opens Oct. 12, followed by Dominique Morisseau's "Confederates" in late February, while Samuel D. Hunter's "A Case for the Existence of God" will close out the season in April. While the return of theater is ample cause for celebration, the fall season will be characterized, first and foremost, by a pervasive feeling of uncertainty. We need only glance at a venue's refund policy to understand that this is not a guaranteed comeback. Several Broadway shows, such as "Come From Away" and "Ain't Too Proud," promise to fully reimburse tickets up to two hours before the scheduled performance, while others are offering ticket transfers. Their websites present a mixed-bag of protocols, each casting a long shadow: the possibility of another surge in cases causing another shutdown. When discussing the personal risk involved in theatergoing during a pandemic, playwright and Barnard lecturer Andy Bragen expressed hesitation about in-house audiences. "Everything's a calculation these days," Bragen said. "I just bought tickets to a friend's show for later in September, and that'll be the first piece of theater I've been to. I guess I feel that between masking and vaccination that it feels pretty okay to me—I'm not totally delighted about it." For students, this staggered return will mean further delays to Columbia's unique "passport" to live performances. Since its establishment in 2004, the immensely popular Arts Initiative has kindled interest in the arts and facilitated student access through discounted Broadway seats. The Ticket and Information Center, the initiative's box office, once drew enormous crowds, with lines spiraling well beyond its corner in the Lerner lobby. Despite high-profile venues such as Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, and the New York City Ballet opening their doors, the TIC will remain closed. "We are committed to upholding the Columbia University compact, which means that off-campus group outings are paused as in-person details continue to evolve," Melissa Smey, executive director of the Arts Initiative, said. The Columbia Community Health Compact, mandatory for returning students and faculty, maintains its own restrictions independent of state guidelines. While the Broadway League now permits indoor seating at full capacity for vaccinated patrons, the University remains in the yellow zone of its COVID-19 Monitoring Plan. Defined as the "low risk" alert level, this status prohibits indoor gatherings of more than 25 people for social or extracurricular events—including performances. "Safety is paramount and the University has done a remarkable job at keeping the campus constituency safe but also the neighborhoods in which our campus is resident, because we're not a campus in a vacuum," Smey said. While some students may choose to explore this tentatively reopened landscape, Smey emphasized that the Arts Initiative will provide opportunities, such as outdoor events and digital programming for students at different comfort levels. For example, this September marks the 10th anniversary of the Morningside Lights—part crafting fair, part glittery parade—when the neighborhood will drift through campus to the sounds of Duke Ellington's "Such Sweet Thunder," carrying decorated, Shakespeare-themed lanterns. Under Smey's leadership, the Miller Theatre will also re-up its "Live from Columbia" series, whose fall broadcasts include a world-class pianist situated, fantastically, between the reading room shelves of Butler Library. Deputy editor Sophie Craig can be contacted at [email protected]. Follow Spectator on Twitter @ColumbiaSpec. Founded in 1877, the Columbia Daily Spectator is the independent undergraduate newspaper of Columbia University, serving thousands of readers in Morningside Heights, West Harlem, and beyond. Read more at columbiaspectator.com and donate here.